Bruce Sanford, a Washington DC based First Amendment lawyer, helped draft the law that Joe Wilson and the rest of the truth-impaired Left keep claiming that Karl Rove broke. What does he think about the current situation? CNN reporter Kyra Phillips asked him.

PHILLIPS: Well, aside from maybe partisan politics, looking strictly at the law that you drafted, do you see any evidence, according to this law, any evidence of any criminal wrongdoing?

SANFORD: No, I think it's pretty clear that what Karl Rove said to Time magazine's Matthew Cooper doesn't even come close to the kind of knowing violation that is required by the act. Really, the act really requires an intent to harm national security, and that certainly can't be said in these circumstances, I think.

PHILLIPS: All right. Now, we've heard a lot about the act, but let's look at it, actually read this portion of Section 421 of the act:

"... knowing that the information disclosed so identifies such covert agent, and that the United States is taking affirmative measures to conceal such covert agent's intelligence relationship to the United States ..."

So in other words, what you're saying, the reason there is no evidence of criminal wrongdoing is because Karl Rove didn't do anything wrong because he didn't know that Plame was covert.

SANFORD: That's pretty clear from the notes, the e-mails that Time magazine released to the grand jury that [White House political adviser] Karl Rove said that [former Ambassador Joseph] Wilson's wife -- he didn't even use her name -- but Wilson's wife "apparently works" at the CIA.

It seems to me there's a substantial question whether she qualifies as the kind of covert agent that was envisioned by the act. There are very tight requirements for that.

And there is a substantial doubt whether the agency was taking the kind of affirmative measures to conceal her identity that the act talks about.

As Sanford notes later on, the CIA made no effort to stop the Novak column. So there was obviously no affirmative attempt to keep her identity concealed. That means the law was not broken, because she was not covered.

But then again, what does Sanford know? He just wrote the law

Posted by: Greg at 01:54 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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